A shirtless man hangs off on the edge of a cliff, with his one arm holding on to a golden ring on the rock, and the other struggling to reach up to the top of the mountain, towards a wrapped gift in a bird nest. "Here is the end. All I gotta do is grab the present. And we don't know." Mumbling to himself, the man sounds exhausted while continuing to launch himself up multiple times, each time down leaving his body swinging more lifelessly. An eagle flies by and lands on the present. And the image fades to black, transitioning to an illustration with the eagle flying away with the prize and leaving the man alone on the rock, roaring in desperation: "What? What! Are you kidding me? That's bullcrap! I just spent 20 minutes doing this, and the bird wins? What the f—" He miraculously held the last word back.
Girp. Bennet Foddy, 2011.
The scene was from the 2011 flash game GIRP, a rock climbing simulator by Bennett Foddy, a game design professor at the NYU Game Center, with a Ph.D. in philosophy. In his talk at the 2012 Game Developer Conference, Foddy proudly showed off this video clip of a player experiencing a mental breakdown from one of the endings of GIRP: "I'm super proud of that, I think that's like a triumph" (10:25-10:28). In this game, players control the orange-haired man to climb up a mountain with rings, each having a letter attached to it. By pressing and holding down the corresponding letters on the keyboard, players make their way up, seeking the hidden prize in the bird nest. Utilizing the locations of different keys on the keyboard, the game creatively fits a rock-climbing concept into the many keys on that sturdy plastic plank by turning its players' fingers into pretzels.
Back in his days as a postdoctoral philosophy researcher at Princeton University, procrastinating on his dissertation, Foddy released another flash game, QWOP, named after their unusual choices of keyboard inputs, which later became an internet sensation. Players play as the sole athlete representing his nation in the 100-meter event at the Olympics. But the controls are frustratingly literal. To move forward, players use only the Q, W, O, and P keys to control the separate movements of the thighs and calves. QWOP, upon its release, was notorious for being difficult to play because of its frustrating controls, which results in abnormal yet funny character animations with his legs oddly positioned. In a way, the game is more realistic than any other expensive blockbuster titles: Instead of simply commanding the direction the runner is going, players directly control the muscle groups responsible for running.
"So more than anything else, what I love about games, what I love about making games, is griefing the player. That's my number one thing." Said Foddy (4:35-4:43). Whether with their awkward control schemes or unforgiving difficulty, his works are intentionally designed to frustrate and torment the players. To find an explanation for his obsession with player frustrations, we need to look into his childhood. Growing up playing games in the 1980s, Foddy had a personal home computer, the ZX Spectrum, and computer games that were direct adaptations of arcade cabinets with uncompromising difficulty and disregard of fairness, while other children were playing Mario and Megaman. Losing all lives in Super Mario Brothers could set the player back only a few levels, but a game over in arcade games meant losing all the progress and starting over from nothing. Additionally, The ZX Spectrum keyboard was flawed with bizarre, unstandardized input schemes due to the lack of arrow keys. Perhaps it is such experience from childhood that inspired him to explore the unorthodoxies in his own works. "I want them to have that experience I had [as a kid]," said Foddy in an interview with Polygon.
And in October 2017, Foddy released another game, named Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. In it players embody the character Diogenes: a muscular bearded man in a metal cauldron, named after the Greek philosopher who rejected all conventions of civilization and culture, favoring a return to the simplicity of nature and, similarly, sleeping inside a large pot in the marketplace of Athens. Through the movement of the mouse, players control him to climb up a mountain with an oversized Yosemite hammer. As players struggle to reach the summit through the game, an invisible narrator, voiced by Foddy himself, reacts and comments on their progress, encouraging as well as discussing game design and meditating on the philosophy of frustration and failure. One of the quotes from the game says, "The frustration is just essential to the act of climbing. And it's authentic to the process of building a game about climbing" (Foddy, Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy). The game makes no secret that it is, like Foddy's other works, interested in player suffering. And as you might expect, Getting Over It offers plenty of opportunities for losses, and is open to recognize and discuss them through songs, quotes or Foddy's own narrations that automatically play when the player loses a significant amount of progress. It is the foundation that all games are built on: victories to be savored and defeats that sting. What makes Getting Over It exceptional, however, is its punishment upon failures.
Game scholar Jesper Juul has pointed to a distinction between failure and punishment in a book dedicated to game failure, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games: "To discuss whether a game is easy, or unfair, we should first distinguish between failure and punishment: when we say that games are becoming easier, it concerns not only our likelihood to fail at a given task, but also the punishment we receive upon failing" (Juul 70). The frustration and pain we feel as we play games depends not just on how frequently we fail, but how hard we are punished for failing. And only when considerable amounts of both are integrated can a game really cause powerful pain in its player. Super Mario Bros, as an example, has regular and constant failures but little punishment. Every once Mario makes certain progress, his location is saved to a checkpoint. And the next time Mario runs into a Goomba (the mushroom-like enemy) or falls down a cliff, rather than restarting the game, he respawns at the last checkpoint he reached. Consequently, even though it is not easy to progress a lot at once, Super Mario Bros is not exactly a mean or painful game to play. In contrast, Getting Over It not only involves regular failures, but also punishments, massive amounts of punishments that are uncaring and unyielding. Sometimes it is a reset of a few feet that is worth minutes of work. Sometimes it is a catastrophic loss of progress, erasing hours of effort and sending Diogenes all the way down the mountain, back to the start of the game, for a single accidental flick of the mouse, miscalculation of an angle, or misjudgment of force.
The monologue by Bennett Foddy also recognizes this difficulty of the mountain he built: "An orange is sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel. That's not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness. It's coffee, it's grapefruit, it's licorice" (Foddy, Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy). The frustration has a certain flavor, like coffee, a bitterness that players either reject or learn to enjoy the taste of; There is an appreciation to be had in the frustration itself. In fact, players go into games expecting the possibility of pain and unpleasantness; A part of ourselves unconsciously wants to be hurt. This ambivalence is named by Jesper Juul, again in his book The art of failure, as the paradox of failure. It can be summarized to the fact that, though people generally avoid pain in real life, they still like to play games where they will likely experience something they usually would avoid. To explain the paradox, Juul connects it to the more generalized paradox of painful art: "Our moment-to-moment desire to avoid unpleasant experiences (for ourselves or for fictional characters) is at odds with a longer-term aesthetic desire in which we understand failure, tragedy, and general unpleasantness to be necessary for our experience" (Juul 115). In other words, our desires are split between the immediate emotional responses and long-term aesthetic demands. As a result, we seek games that open the possibility to failure, that let us experience partial or temporary pain, even if we do not like it when we fail at the moment.
Getting Over It's design breaks with tradition and embraces the pain of failure not just as a necessary factor of game and life but as something desirable, the bitterness needed to make the overall taste much more delicious. Yet, it is evident that Getting Over It is far more ambitious than just exploring the flavors of frustration and failure in design. And it is in how the game presents itself, the absurd visuals. Initially, the mountain, as anyone would imagine, is built with boulders and trees. But as Diogenes climbs his way up, it becomes increasingly absurd and overwhelming, like an absurdist dream, a mountain of trash, that consists of consumer products and artificial constructions. Such an environment puts the game not only as a meditation on frustration and failure, but also as a contemplation on the digital age and trash culture of the InternetInternet. Everything in the game, every rock and tree, every piece of furniture and box, even the player character is a pre-existing asset Foddy downloaded from online resources and reassembled into this mountain of trash. "Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage" (Foddy, Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy). "Maybe this is what digital culture is. A monstrous mountain of trash, the ash-heap of creativity's fountain. A landfill of everything we ever thought of in it. Grand, Infinite, and unsorted" (Foddy, Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy).
And it is not just the items in the game that are prefabricated. When not explaining the design process and philosophy behind the game itself, the narration gives quotes on the theme of failure from Abraham Lincoln to Jennifer Anniston, which are all, in a way, another kind of premade asset. This quality is also represented by the various traditional blues songs that automatically play when players fall and lose their game progress. Not only are they pre-existing songs, but in some cases, these are songs that have been covered and re-recorded so many times that their actual origin is lost in time, such as “Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad”. Even its gameplay is derivative. Bennett Foddy directly mentions at the very beginning of the climbing, explaining how the game pays homage to a 2002 game, Sexy Hiking, by the mysterious and enigmatic and now retired game designer Jazzuo, which features a similarly unforgiving mountain climbing with a hammer, and is built entirely out of recycled materials.
This introduces two sides of trash culture. On the one hand it is considered to be inexpensive, consumable, and disposable. "When everything around us is cultural trash, trash becomes the new medium, the lingua franca of the digital age. And you can build culture out of trash, but only trash culture: B-games, B-movies, B-music, B-philosophy" (Foddy, Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy). The nature of Getting Over It being an incohesive collection of trash itself serves as a critique to this new trash culture on the Internet, where people only reuse pre-existing materials instead of creating their original. But it is also in that context of digital cultural trash, in these B-games, where Foddy discovered a place for his experiments, the unusual controls, and harsh gameplay. He sees something quite different and much more artistic and authentic. "B-Games are rough assemblages of found objects. Designers slap them together very quickly and freely, and they're often too rough and unfriendly to gain much of a following. They're built more for the joy of building them than as polished products" (Foddy, Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy). There is an emphasis on game development being a journey rather than a goal. Rather than for aesthetic value or user experience, they are made for the sake of creating, much like Foddy's own games that center around the appreciation towards failure and frustration for their own sake.
Bennett Foddy's games are always the antithesis of what a good game, traditionally, is. They are meant to be disobedient and harsh in the way many artistic works are. And that is strange in an industry where most developers are trying to eliminate player frustration at every opportunity. In his article “Eleven Flavors of Frustration”, he argues that "A game that is completely devoid of frustration is likely to be a game without friction, without disobedience. Games that are perfectly obedient are mere software" (1). Games stand at the crossroads between software and art: Art, instead of always being enjoyable or entertaining, often provokes or challenges the viewer, whereas when a piece of software challenges or frustrates the user, it is considered an objective failure of the design. Most games today lean heavily towards the software side of the spectrum which Foddy considers dangerous especially in the age where the intersection of video games and real life has grown more and more blurred. Media Theory scholar Mckenzie Wark has written about this growing ability of video games to mimic or encapsulate the world, or the tendency of our society to function like a game, in his book Gamer Theory. "You are a gamer whether you like it or not, now that we all live in a gamespace that is everywhere and nowhere" (Wark 02). He took the concept of Plato's cave and developed his own version, The Cave™, a darkened room that offers access to game consoles in contrast to the more bright real world which he oddly called the gamespace. Unlike the cave of Plato which assumes a more realistic and legitimate understanding of the world beyond human perception, in Wark's allegory the players that played at The Cave™ since their childhood may be dazzled by the light of real world when they first entered, but they would soon find out that the real world is not so different from the cave:. "You observe that world after world, cave after cave, what prevails is the same agon, the same digital logic of one versus the other, ending in victory or defeat." (Wark 06).
However, most games today have grown increasingly forgiving to intentionally avoid upset or harsh feelings and to provide escapes from reality. They can no longer be obstinate, unyielding, and uninviting, but become fast foods, saccharine treats that give players the empty dopamine release of victory at no cost of sacrifice. If these games were played in The Cave™, the real world would be overwhelming for the players since all the obstacles they have experienced were fake. In that sense, every obstacle in Foddy's games is real. "Imaginary mountains build themselves from our efforts to climb them, and it's our repeated attempts to reach the summit that turns those mountains into something real" (Foddy, Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy). Foddy's games work as a critique of games designed to be effortlessly consumed without pain, and serve to pose the question of why we have moved away from games with punishments, disappointments, the more aggravating aspects of games, in contrast to how much we gain pleasures from them. Again as Gamer Theory suggests, life is a game, and we are all players. We live our lives actively avoiding negative emotions like fear or sadness. Yet, we find ourselves enjoying the experience of watching a scary movie through our fingers or crying to a heart-wrenching novel. There is undeniable value to these otherwise undesirable emotions when they are experienced in certain contexts.
Till today I have not beaten any of Bennett's published games. I have reached the top of GIRP, only to be defeated by a bird; I have crawled all the way to the end of QWOP, only to find a hurdle that is impossible to go over; And I have fallen in Getting Over It too many times, losing all my progress. Yet, unlike while playing other games, I do not feel bad for my inability to beat these games that are much more about the journey than the finish line. Because I have embodied Diogenes' will, his intent, in his uphill ascent, of struggling with something for its own sake, not out of necessity but as a choice.
Works Cited
Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. Bennett Foddy, 2017.
GIRP. Bennett Foddy, 2011.
QWOP. Bennett Foddy, 2008.
Super Mario Bros. Nintendo, 1985.
Dornbush, Jonathon. “The Appropriately Strange Journey of QWOP's Creator from Philosopher to Game Professor.” Polygon, 7 Oct. 2013, https://www.polygon.com/2013/10/7/4786622/the-appropriately-strange-journey-of-qwops-creator-from-philosopher.
Foddy, Bennett. “Eleven Flavors Of Frustration.”
Foddynet, 15 Jan. 2017,
GDC. “The Story Behind QWOP.”
YouTube, 17 Nov. 2016,
Juul, Jesper. The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games.
The MIT Press, 2013,
Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory.
Harvard University Press, 2007,
